Patch 3.0

What to do what to do? So many new juicy talents, so few talent points to spend! It is so exciting to see all the new talents and think about the new possibilities.

Even though I am a tank at heart, one of the things I kept thinking when going over the new protection talent tree was all the possibilities that the new protection talents bring to PVP. Sounds a little bizarre, doesn’t it?

Think of some of these new talents in terms of PVP:

Improved Spell Reflection – A 15 rage ability on a 10 second cooldown that lasts for 5 seconds. This would be awesome in a PVP situation.

Toughness – Reduced movement impairing effects is always a good thing in PVP.

Improved Disarm – Reduces disarm to 40 second cooldown, and lasts for 10 seconds. Think about that. You can now, remove that MS warriors weapon for 20 seconds out of a minute. OR, you can use that disarm against a focus target to help burst them down with the increased damage.

Vigilance – Think about how much easier this will make it to keep that hunter/warlock pet pulled off of your healer or otherwise.

Shockwave – Pulling this off in arenas will be tricky, but a 4 sec stun on the entire team would be pretty devastating, not to mention you’ll be able to do it every 20 seconds.

Now granted, MS is still pretty much required for serious arena play, but protection warriors just got a boost to viability in PVP. Couple all the above with the fact that prot DPS has increased dramatically and you now have a very good shot at going PVP as prot.

Tanking

But of course, we’re here to talk about tanking, right?! I suppose at this point I could post up my planned 3.0 tanking spec and we could hash out why I made the choices I did. Long story short is that there are so many abilities, I just want ’em all! Waiting the next month before we’ll get new talent points is going to be brutal! Until then, I’ll probably tinker with a few different specs in regards to tanking. I’ll be looking at Main Tank specs, as well as OT/Support/DPS specs too.

Comments

Def Warriors gonna rock the BGs and im confident you will see them even in Arena. I used to crit around 1.2k with my shield slam before the patch, everyone ganked me and i never ever got a kill or last hit. now if i get attacked im just charging and take the sucker out with a few badass heavy crits ranging from 2.5k – 3.5k. and im still geared like a newb, 10k hp and 14k armor, but lots of additional block. Cant wait to see a lvl 80 geared up prot warri running berserk in BG or open pvp zone. No more “oh look a def warri, lets gank him”, but more “oh my god a def warri.. lets hide!” :D

I actually didnt take Vigilance even after respeccing a couple of times… I really have not had any problems keeping threat on multiple mobs. Generally if i have some high DPS AoE’ers I will make them focus fire the first target and that is plenty of time for me to lock in all those other ones.

Then again, I rarely AoE tank with my boss gear on. I am running about 1200 AP, 1056 block value unbuffed, and only 443 defense to ensure that rage is coming in hard core.

I also went with the 2 points in imp revenge, instead of imp disciplines just because I think i get a bit more milage out of the increased revenge dmg. It is pretty gross to see that revenge smash something in the face for 2200

Hey Blizzam. I’m kinda wondering if you’ll be doing an entry on inscriptions and how they’ll relate to tanking? I’ve just gotten 2 inscriptions tonight, haven’t had a chance to try them out in an instance yet, but I got one for increased battle shout, which seems like it’ll be very handy, and one that makes your sunder armor hit 2 enemies, which I imagine will be very helpful for keeping groups under sunder armor. What do you think?

So I was doing my dailies at the isle, and there comes a 70 warlock to kill me. so I charge, stun, silence, shockwave, shield slam, devastate, and repeat over and over. Result: I KILLED A WARLOCK??!!!
Amazing new spec for prot warrios.

Hey guys with all the points to spend and easy TPS what kind a gem’s seem to be the new choise? Old school was Stam stam stam. Has anyone been trying Stren, AP, hit, crit, combo’s ect. I would love to see my TPS break 2500. Warrior tanks FTW

I hear ya Bizzam it was just a thought due to Pallys and Druids. There TPS seems to be really high. It seems to happen to me every once and a while that they pull aggo off me. I notice there TPS on omen hitting over 3k. any suggestions on keeping up a high amount of TPS thx for ur imput

A lot of it is going to depend on your gear and level of content. Pay particular attention to your attack rotation as it has greatly changed from before and being able to rapidly determine your next best threat move is going to be very important.